Privacy algorithm for cylindrical holographic weapons surveillance system

Abstract

A novel personnel surveillance system has been developed to detect and identify threatening objects, which are undetectable by metal detectors, concealed on the human body. This new system can detect threats which are fabricated with plastic, liquid, metal, or ceramic. It uses millimeter-wave array technology and a cylindrical holographic imaging algorithm to provide full-body, 360-degree coverage of a person in near real-time. This system is ideally suited for mass transportation centers such as airport checkpoints that require high throughput rates and full coverage. Research and development efforts are underway to produce a privacy algorithm that removes the human features from the images while identifying the potential threats. This algorithm locates and segments the threats and places them on a wire-frame humanoid representation. The research areas for this algorithm development include artificial neural networks, image processing, edge detection, and dielectric measurements. This system is operational and results from this test and the privacy algorithm will be discussed in this paper.